TLDR: The community and fraudster techniques have evolved such that SteamRep’s ‘reputation’ model, established over a decade ago, is no longer effective or sustainable enough to maintain.
SteamRep was designed to safeguard gamers against members of the community who committed fraud or other illicit behavior. This was done through education as well as community reporting of malicious actors.
Over time, as the community grew and trading became more complex, so too did the methods used to steal. Scammers now frequently use alternate accounts and third-party platforms to obfuscate their actions, preventing reasonable evidence gathering.
The individual scammer has become the exception, and in its place are organized criminal groups stealing users’ accounts en masse, selling off those items, and using these stolen accounts to find their next unsuspecting victim.
SteamRep lacks the information that Valve or Law Enforcement has access to, and is largely ineffective against this level of organized fraud. Many of the reports we receive are reporting users who themselves are the victims of account hijackings, and trying to take action against those users only results in further difficulties.
Unfortunately, the majority of exposure SteamRep has with the community at large occurs after a user becomes a victim of a scam, and there is nothing we can do to help those who are already victims. This makes SteamRep’s objective of using education to prevent scams from occurring less effective. Due to these developments, and the challenge of working within the existing model, we felt a sunset was for the best.
This has been a long journey, and we very much appreciate all of the community and partner support, as well as the incredible hard work of our volunteers over the years.
What’s the timeline?
While SteamRep’s ultimate dissolution is set in stone, the finer details are largely open-ended right now, as we seek staff/partner feedback on considerations needed for sunset. We have a rough outline approved by the OFPF (Online Fraud and Prevention Foundation) Board:
- Effective immediately, no new scam reports will be processed by SteamRep. Partners' bans from scam reports will not be reflected in SteamRep.
- All partner admin tags will be discarded on Saturday, June 29th, the date of this announcement, with limited exceptions (e.g. working in appeals).
- Public notes from Notable Affiliate profiles will also be removed, and the section of our website featuring them will be taken down.
- New appeals will be closed as of Saturday, July 13th. No appeals submitted after that date - SteamRep or partners - will be honored, but all appeals created prior to that date will be processed by end of 2024.
- Some partners may choose, at their sole discretion, to extend this cutoff for themselves on a community by community basis.
- SteamRep's forums and main website, including all reports, appeals, and other evidence, will be retired at the end of 2024. The API will continue to function at this time.
- SteamRep's API will be retired June 15th, 2025.
- An archive of our BANNED and CAUTION tags will be exported and shared with the public.
Below is the preliminary overview. We will have more details as we discuss more with our staff and partners.
Reputation Database (i.e. steamrep.com):
- Website will remain viewable until end of calendar year 2024
- API calls will be retired as of June 15, 2025.
- A backup dump of all bans will be published for the community to use as they see fit after that time.
- BANNED and CAUTION tags will be preserved.
- We are evaluating the practicality of preserving public notes (Additional Info from Admins), and may include this in the backup alongside BANNED and CAUTION tags.
- All Private notes, evidence, and anything else not specified here, will be discarded.
- Everything else not listed here will be discarded, and to protect everyone's privacy, we have taken proactive measures to prevent anyone in the community from creating their own backup.
- New reports will be suspended upon public announcement
- Access to private sections of forum will be suspended
- Requests from community admins go through Private Requests.
- New OPT OUT requests will be put on pause mid July.
- A different system may be replacing it, still in discussion.
- No new forum accounts as of Q4 (exact date TBD).
- At the end of year, forum will be discarded, no backups made.
What should partners do about pending reports or appeals in their queue?
Effective immediately, no new scam reports may be submitted to our database, either through SteamRep or any partner community. Partners' bans from scam reports in their own communities will not be reflected in SteamRep. We will attempt to honor unresolved reports in partner communities that were created prior to this announcement of sunset (if active).
SteamRep admins reserve the right to make exceptions and issue BANNED tags at any time prior to full sunset in extreme circumstances - such as a rogue admin taking advantage of this announcement. Such tags will be included in the final export of BANNED and CAUTION tags, allowing communities to continue excluding such individuals from their sites or servers. Same applies to appeals.
Why not give it to someone else?
We welcome any partners or other communities who wish to help protect the community from scammers, but while we trust our partners today, it would be impossible to guarantee that any successor would/could maintain integrity practices in perpetuity. Similarly, we cannot make any long-term guarantees about proper handling of evidence data. In the end, to protect privacy, that data will not be transferred to any community wishing to carry the mission.
What is happening to OFPF (and donations)?
SteamRep has not been accepting donations for a long while now, but the Online Fraud Prevention Foundation (OFPF) charity has sufficient remaining funds to manage the site through the sunset period.
OFPF itself will continue after the sunset, but any future plans here are not certain. The goal is to continue its mission of protecting online gamers from fraud through education, awareness, and tools. If your community is working in this space, we’d be happy to discuss how OFPF knowledge or resources can assist in stopping online fraud.
For discussion, see this thread: https://forums.steamrep.com/threads/steamrep-is-shutting-down.201641/
